Firefox is doing some research on what they call User Personalization.

A quick summary could be: allowing users to share their preferences (based on their browser history) with websites to get a personalized experience. It’s one of their latest experiment on local data analysis, privacy, personalization and user experience.

It’s great to see Firefox trying new avenues but in the last couple of years, user has seen his life, his data on the web being harvested, stolen by advertising companies for the sake of personalization content and targeted ads.

They are all saying the same thing: the web is not free, website needs to make some money, pay their bills.

It’s true.

But it’s not the issue here. The issue is not to have some ads on a website I’m reading. The issue is companies tracking users across thousand of website with various technologies (cookies, Google +1, Facebook Like, flash LSO, etc etc etc!) without any explicit consent. These companies are tracking you, your children, your mom…

It’s money. 37 billions in the US.

So seeing Firefox creating yet another way for these companies to get your data is insulting. A very bad joke.

But do not fear, you still have the useless Do Not Track feature… Yeah right…